Wat jy saai, sal jy maai

A corpse lay waiting on the slab in the center of the cell, its bones screaming. Nadia focused on the silvered skulls of the queen’s crown, the shrike beaks frozen agape and glinting in the torchlight, as a soldier fastened manacles around her ankles.

“Please, you don’t have to do this.” All of her father’s warnings came back to haunt her, circling like vultures. “Please, I won’t do it again.”

“Oh yes, you will.” The queen’s pale face remained an impassive map of jigsaw shadows.

Nadia winced at the clinking of the chains—an atonal accompaniment to the morass of melodies rising from the dead body. It provided a nauseating counterpoint to the whispers emanating from both the queen and the soldier. Only Nadia could hear the songs trapped in their bones.

“If I do what you ask, will you let me go?” Nadia asked, the words sour on her tongue. She already knew the answer, knew the queen had little mercy to spare.

“I’m not inclined to litter my queendom with your kind.” The queen’s sneer was a grinning hyena slash across her thin lips. “Here you have all you need.” She gestured to a table set with carving tools. “Deliver what I want and perhaps I won’t have your head.”

With a swirl of white and a tinkling of jewelry, the queen left the cell. Her steps echoed down the corridor in staccato ricochets, her marrow-caged melodies fading.

The soldier hesitated at the heavy wooden door hinged with iron, as if that would contain the magic in Nadia’s blood. The soldier seemed about to say something, but only hung her head, black curls obscuring her face as she offered Nadia a parting bow. The bolts slammed into place, sealing Nadia in a premature tomb.

She wrapped her fingers around the bone splinters strung about her throat, the necklace murmuring in fading echoes—her only comfort as her father’s words swarmed like relentless mosquitoes.

Trying to ignore the bones, Nadia dragged her fingers across the stone walls, humming as she searched for the faintest resonance or murmur of possible escape. Only the distant thunder of the sea breaking against the palace cliffs shuddered beneath her touch. Only the hollow moans of other prisoners confined in the dank dark droned a low thrum.

Sweating, trembling, no longer able to resist, Nadia turned to face the granite altar in the center of her cell. The body had been flayed and boiled, the skeleton stripped of stifling flesh. Now, acknowledged, the songs rose in elegy. They, too, longed for freedom.

For fifteen years, Nadia had endured life in the crossroads town serving one kermis or another as they trundled across the veld, skirting the trembling rent at the edge of the world. Nadia had dreamed of running away, of hitching a ride among the striped tents and seeing the world beyond the Fray-stained confines of her home.

Magic leaked through the rift between worlds, streaking the sky with violent orange and bilious green. The Fray warped those it infected, only sometimes bestowing them with arcane powers. Fray-touched, the imbued were called, and—Fray-touched—Nadia had worked with her father in his business of skin and stitches. He had only ever been interested in the husks, filling up empty carcasses to give the animals new life at the end of strings and pulleys. Meerkats and aardvarks, nagapies, civets, and stranger creatures fallen through the Fray, all became marionettes for crude kermis stages.

Nadia had obediently stitched beads into yawning eye sockets, though her bones juddered discordant as her fingers itched with unspent spells. She’d hoarded discarded skeletons, learning the secret songs only her Fray-touched ears could hear. Slowly, she learned to weave and thread the melodies into symphonies of her own devising, scratching Fray-gifted symbols into bone and inhaling the dust, tasting the memories of the deceased as she strung their bones on wire and made them dance.

“Has anyone seen?” her father had asked, even as he crushed the rattling skeleton of a puff adder, slithering rib over naked rib across the workroom floor, beneath his heel. “Does anyone know what you are?”

“No.” Her only friends were the dead. “No Papa, no one knows.”

“You’re just like your mother.” Not that Nadia knew. Her father had never shared the secret of her mother’s magic or what she’d done to earn the ire of the town. He’d grabbed Nadia’s wrists, searching her arms for signs of the rust.

“Do you want to end up like her?”

Cool as it was in the ossuary, sweat peppered Nadia’s brow. Using magic had its cost and using her gift without royal sanction had consequences. Those had jangled at Nadia’s ankles for a year now, gnawing runnels into her flesh. This was her punishment, to touch the dead with hands that had once healed the living, and to never be touched in return.

Nadia caressed an elegantly curved clavicle and ran her tongue along the smooth edge of a pearlescent rib, savoring the tune tangling on her breath. She began with the skull, always, and always with the teeth. Carefully, she salvaged the molars and incisors not yet lost to age or rot. Three were perfect. She needed only one.

Picking up her sharpened scribe, Nadia set upon the tooth. She sang as she worked, releasing the Fray-gifted magic snarled in her sinews in throaty vocables. With lines and spirals, Nadia engraved the yellowed enamel and its edges sharpened to a ready fang. She inhaled bitter memory, swallowing bone dust and the life of the prisoner in her hands. Duty, honor, treachery, torture—Nadia’s marrow trilled in sympathy with the echoes of calcified pain.

Carefully, she punctured the flesh of her thumb, smearing blood into the carved rills, staining the tooth with her desire for escape and revenge. Perhaps this time she’d be able to do it. Satisfied, she secreted the molar in her apron pocket. Later, she would put it to use. Now, Nadia fondled the rest of the bones, tapping each in turn and listening with an ardent ear.

“Why would you do this?” Nadia’s father had stood, haggard and gray in the doorway, a half-stuffed hyrax dangling from his hand.

“I wanted to know her. And I thought you’d like it.” Nadia had toiled for hours, first digging up the grave then washing the bones before engraving her spells in delicate filigree across skull and sternum, savoring every inhalation of dust and memory. Finally, she was starting to know the mother she’d lost.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” The skeleton sat, spelled from head to hip, upon the table. She turned, spine clinking like chimes. The skeleton reached a wire-threaded hand toward her husband, jaw opening. Only Nadia could hear her mother singing.

With a sob, her father had dropped the hyrax and picked up the maggot-smeared shovel where it rested against the wall. He raised it above his shoulder and held Nadia’s gaze when he swung it.

Nadia had knelt among the shards still tangled in wire, weeping and inhaling the last of her mother’s scattered memories, the mother she’d hardly known. She, too, had been Fray-touched and the magic had corroded her insides, turning her veins ashen, and her skin into flakes that sloughed away at the slightest touch. Wat jy saai, sal jy maai, the words were bitter on Nadia’s tongue.

The queen would have people believe they deserved being afflicted by the rust in retribution for accepting the touch of the Fray. Not that any of the Fray-touched had chosen the strange magic boiling in their veins. And so, it wasn’t the rust that had killed Nadia’s mother before Nadia had taken her first steps. She’d been beheaded in the town square, a warning to others and reminder of how the queen looked harshly upon those who practiced feral magic.

Nadia’s father collapsed beside her and lifted her hands where they were buried in fragments of a past she could never heal. She’d thought he would embrace her and kiss her hair. Instead, he pushed up her sleeves and traced his thumb across the darkened veins, following the trail to the crook of her elbow where her skin was cracked and mottled red.

In the ossuary, Nadia brushed away the cobweb of memory and regret, trying not to scratch at her arms, pitted and eroded beneath her sleeves. The fibula in her hand responded to her whispered song, its voice meaty as if it remembered being slicked in gristle and blood, and how the queen had ordered its flesh pared away.

Nadia had appealed to the queen for gentler deaths so the bones might sing instead of scream. The queen had only laughed.

With fingers made stiff by the rust, Nadia began assembling the chimes. She continued to hum as she etched her scrimshaw spells across the ivory surfaces, oozing viscous blood from the prick-wounds on her hands to bolster the magic.

Hours flitted by, but Nadia barely noticed as she joined mandible to clavicle, ulna to tibia. A knock startled her and she fumbled with her scribe. A moment later, the door opened and the curly haired soldier stood before her. It had been more than a year since she’d first placed the chains on Nadia’s ankles, time etched across her forehead in a new accumulation of lines and in the scars on her arms from the frequent skirmishes along the realm’s western border. The queen was growing greedy, determined to expand her empire armed with bones singing her enemies into surrender and servitude.

Is it done? Zalani asked with her hands.

“As the queen commanded,” Nadia said.

I brought supper. Zalani was the only soldier the queen trusted in Nadia’s presence, deaf to her songs and magic, but not entirely immune. The soldier deposited a basket on a small table on the opposite side of the room, her elbow bumping Nadia’s as she passed. Nadia barely felt it—her flesh numb beneath the spreading rust. The rust had eaten its way across her belly and breasts and up her spine, deadening her body to touch, and soon enough to breath as the skin across her ribs became a crushing corset. She refused to die in these dungeons to the delight—or indifference—of the queen.

“Are you sure I can’t help you?” Nadia asked the soldier, raising the scribe to her ear. “The queen never needs to know.”

Zalani smiled and shook her head. All I ask is that if my bones ever land on your table, make my song beautiful.

Nadia set down the scribe and felt for the tooth in her apron. It had to work. This might be her final chance, if the soldier would accept her touch.

Zalani took up position against the wall, arms folded over her chest. She no longer flinched at the abattoir odor nor balked at the gruesome detritus littering the cell. Her gaze settled on Nadia and Nadia tried not to think about how it would feel to run her tongue along the soldier’s bones.

Eat, Zalani gestured.

With a clatter of chain, Nadia moved from the workbench to the table. In the basket, there were koeksisters, fresh bread, and a flagon of water. The koeksisters were delicious. The braided pastries burst with sweetness and the taste of home as she bit into one after another. Thank you, Nadia signed with sticky fingers.

I remembered what you said last time, that they’re your favorite.

Nadia listened to the soft music trickling through the soldier’s flesh. Zalani was all hard muscle, corded veins, taut sinews, and twanging tendons. Nadia longed to disrobe the soldier’s bones.

Instead, she took a tentative step forward, chains clanking. Zalani didn’t move away as Nadia pressed her hand to her sun-kissed cheek. The first touch in more than a year.

I’m not supposed—

“The queen will never know.” Nadia caught Zalani’s hands in her own and brought them to rest on her hips. She released a heavy sigh as she cupped the hard edge of Zalani’s jaw, then moved her hands lower, tracing the angles of the soldier’s collarbone, the plain of her sternum, the rills and troughs of ribs through the thin cotton of her tunic. Her marrow thrummed at Nadia’s touch, the melody waiting for release.

Nadia slipped her hand against Zalani’s skin, hesitating a moment before pressing her palm to the soldier’s chest, and the tooth secreted between her blood-streaked fingers bit true. Zalani’s eyes widened, mouth falling open. Nadia pressed a finger to her lips and began to sing. The soldier fell silent as the tooth gnawed deeper, carrying Nadia’s blood and magic to the soldier’s bones. Nadia reached for her scribe as Zalani slumped against the wall. Then, Nadia began to carve.

Nadia had hitched a ride on a south-bound kermis with shards of her mother still caught in the hem of her trousers. Her arms itched, her wrists ringed blue from her father’s fingers. If only she could escape the town and the reaching shadow of the Fray that had already left her scarred.

She’d plucked the slivers of bone where they snagged on her seams and strung them on a cord around her throat. They carried barely a whisper, the tiniest murmur of memory still trapped, but Nadia could feel their thrum and felt her mother near.

It was between the colored tents and jumbled strays of the kermis, some Fray-touched flotsam like herself, that Nadia began to understand what she was. The folk brought her bits of bone and ivory and she caught those ossified echoes, weaving together her own offerings of song before etching the bones to create talismans to soothe a fever or monthly cramps. Her reputation grew, a line waiting for the scrimshander in every town before the kermis even scuttled into view.

Nadia had felt protected among the folk. She knew none in the kermis would betray her the way a townie had betrayed her mother.

It was at a seaside village where the white-washed homes clutched like mussels to the cliffs that a girl her own age had brought her a dying cat.

“I heard you’re a healer,” she’d said, pressing a parcel of dried fish and a bracelet knotted with seaglass into her hands. “Please, don’t let her die, at least not in pain.”

Nadia slipped the bracelet over her wrist before accepting the injured animal. Deaf and almost blind, the old tabby had been hit by a cart. Her ribs were broken and organs bruised. Nadia listened to the song rising plaintive from feline bones.

“I’ve never done this to a living thing,” she said, but her mother had—a truth she’d gleaned from bone dust.

“First time for everything. You have to try.” The girl had smiled, all crooked teeth and pale skin burned by the sun.

Nadia had let the melodies guide her hand, listening for where the song twisted out of tune. Gently, she’d pressed the scribe through fur and flesh until it hit broken bone, all the while humming a counter-melody, coaxing the notes back into key as she scratched spells across the fractures.

The cat had yowled, carving her own displeasure in deep gouges across Nadia’s hands. Her blood, already rust-thickened, had slicked the scribe and the song had strengthened, the tabby’s bones knitting closed as blood and music worked in harmony. A pang skewered Nadia’s heart. If only she had known, she might’ve opened her veins and made her mother whole.

The girl had thanked her with tears and smiles, and—later—in the tent Nadia called home, pitched at the western edge of the kermis, the girl had gifted the scrimshander the opportunity for another first. Nadia still dreamed of that tangle of fingers and tongues, drowning in the song of the girl’s bones, wishing she could climb inside her skin and taste every note.

Word spread and Nadia no longer made talismans or trinkets, but spent her days up to her elbows in gore, parting living flesh to scrape spells into bone. She healed fractures and bruises, sang away infection and unwanted pregnancy, reveling in the adoration of those she helped, sharing the rewards with the kermis folk who’d never minded her flaking skin.

The kermis had continued south, joining others for the Grand Fete on the outskirts of the capital. Nadia had been dazzled by the city, built on cliffs above the ocean. Here the sky burned blue, untouched by the lurid talon of the Fray. Here too, dwelled the queen who’d commanded her mother’s death. The pink marble palace graced the pinnacle, a sovereign shadow cast over the multi-colored cluster of homes. And the songs! Thousands upon thousands of bones raised their voices in glorious cacophony.

It was two days and multiple healings later that the queen’s soldiers came for her: a Fray-touched, rust-bitten practitioner of unsanctioned magic. They dragged her from the kermis through the glossy streets of the capital. Nadia didn’t resist; she’d been expecting them.

“All I do is help people,” Nadia had said when the queen had questioned her before demanding a demonstration. Nadia had obliged, curing a festering wound in a soldier’s leg. Nadia had thought it would make the queen see her magic was harmless, that the queen had been wrong about her mother; that Nadia would win her freedom and perhaps even an apology. Instead she’d been interred in the dungeons and wrapped in chains.

Nadia had opted for haste instead of precision, not bothering to seal the wounds littering Zalani’s chest. The soldier walked before her, eyes glassy and stare unblinking. The front of her tunic hung open, bloodied, her chest bearing a topography of scabs and scarlet rivulets. The soldier answered any resistance with her sword and fist, leaving a line of groaning bodies in their wake.

Nadia cradled the skeleton chimes in her arms, muting their voice while they were still caged by palace walls. A breeze, a splash of sunlight across the mosaic flooring. Nadia stumbled as the brightness assaulted her eyes, as the scent of sea and earth assailed her nostrils. A year kept in torchlight. A year with nothing but copper and rot in her stiffening lungs. Nadia drew as deep a breath as her rust-thickened skin would allow, devouring the salt-slick air.

She stepped into the courtyard, met by myriad curious gazes and questioning frowns. Soldiers’ hands shifted to weapons, courtiers gossiped behind jewel-adorned fingers, servants hurried away casting only the most furtive of glances in Nadia’s direction. Evening wind poured off the sea, the currents tumbling through the courtyard and shaking the songs from the numerous chimes already dangling from every pergola and eave. The city reverberated with a hundred dead voices—each crafted by Nadia and stained with her blood.

She studied the courtyard, following the many threads of the sonorous tapestry weaving through the air. Melodies made to imbue the listener with content, with gratitude, with love and loyalty.

“Here.” She tugged Zalani to a stop and, docile, the soldier obeyed. With her help, Nadia secured the fresh chimes in the south-west corner of the courtyard. Two soldiers rushed over, swords drawn. Deftly, Nadia unfurled the bones. The wind blew and the chimes began to sing, adding their voice to the chorus issuing from the palace eaves.

The soldiers rushing towards her faltered, their swords hanging loose in arms gone limp. At first, a clash of harmonies. Dissonance polluted the twilight and the throngs grimaced, clapping their hands over their ears. A few, like Zalani, instead scratched at their skin as the music slipped a blade between their sinews.

Gradually, the bones settled, finding their shared resonance, entrained for renewed purpose. A subtle modulation and nails peeled away from raw skin, hands uncovered ears.

The queen stepped into the courtyard in a flourish of white and silver. Her crown sat askew atop her blond tresses. The gleaming skulls reflected the sunset in shades of fresh-spilled entrails. Dismay widened her eyes. Anger blotched across her cheeks and fear turned down the corners of her mouth.

“What have you done?” she asked, a hand pressed to her throat and Nadia lifted her own to clutch the necklace she still wore.

“For my mother.” Courtiers and servants alike turned to face the queen, teeth bared, hands balled into fists. How easily devotion became sedition, a simple transposition scribed with careful spell. Wat jy saai, sal jy maai, the words were sweet as honey now as soldiers drew their weapons and advanced. Zalani too, but Nadia caught the soldier’s arm and drew her close, their bodies thrumming as the scrimshaw song curdled on the sea wind and the queen’s blood stained pink marble red.